It may seem comparatively easy to be humble when we fail and are disappointed, but in point of fact it is a very difficult task. Failures wound our pride, and wounded pride is wont to resent the smart. Either anger, rage, or a desire for revenge on those who have caused our failure supervenes, or else we are utterly cast down and dispirited, and ready to give up all further effort. Ask yourself how failures affect you.

Yet even when they are not borne altogether as they should be, failures are very useful to the soul. Under their influence we can scarcely keep from having a lower opinion of ourselves, and learning the necessary lesson of endurance of what we dislike. It yields, almost without any co-operation on our part, the peaceable fruit of justice to those that are exercised thereby. Though failure may bring out evil tendencies which are more powerful to us, and of which we cannot help being conscious, yet the unconscious pride that success engenders is far more dangerous to the soul. Thank God, then, for your failures.

What would be our spirit under failure or apparent failure? (1) We must not be cast down, but begin again cheerily. (2) We must beware of blaming others who have caused or contributed to it. (3) We must attribute it to our own defects, or to the just judgment of God punishing our sins in the past. (4) We must thank God for it, offer it up to Him, and beg that it may make us more humble. (5) We must remember that for those who love God there is no failure. All is success under the guise of failure, for to those who love God all things work together for good.

O God, who resistest the proud, and givest thy grace to the humble, grant me that true humility of which thy adorable Son has left us the example. Notwithstanding the powerful obstacles which my natural inclinations oppose to this virtue, I ardently desire to learn of Him to be meek and humble of heart. I am filled with confusion, O Lord, when I reflect on my inordinate love of esteem and applause, my extreme fear of contempt and humiliation, my independence of spirit, my attachment to my own ideas and opinion, my secret satisfaction in success, my latent mortification at seeing others preferred, my insatiable desire of praise and honor. O Lord, I should despair of the cure of maladies so numerous and grievous, did not I know that thou art an Almighty Physician, to whom nothing is impossible. Cast on me, O my God, a look of compassion, and have mercy on me. Grant that I may know thee, to love thee alone ; that I may know myself, to comprehend the depth of my miseries.

May I never forget the many motives that urge me to the practice of humility, the sins of my past life, my inclination to evil, my inconstancy in virtue, my tepidity in thy service, my ingratitude towards thee, my daily infidelities, and the innumerable defects which, notwithstanding my pride, I cannot disguise from myself. May I at length do myself justice, by sincerely believing myself to be the last of all creatures; may I henceforth shun praise as sedulously as I have hitherto sought it; may my only aim be to please thee, my only desire to be forgotten by the world; may the remembrance of the account I shall have to render of Thy graces, prove a perpetual stimulus to the practice of humility in the use of them. If by thy grace I am ever capable of doing any thing to promote Thy honor, I will refer the glory to thee alone; I will think of the voluntary humiliations of my Savior; I will take Him for my model, that by attaining resemblance with Him, I may deserve to be one day ranked among His elect in the kingdom of heaven. Amen.